Here are some selected resources for learning more about The Great Believers, the research that went into it, and how you can learn more about HIV/AIDS.
Interviews about The Great Believers
Selected Print:
Selected Audio:
Essays
“How to Write Across Difference” for Literary Hub
“A Novel in Five Residencies” for Poets & Writers
“My Book, the Movie” for My Book, the Movie
“Interiority Complex” for Craft
Resources
It is my great hope that if The Great Believers is one of the first things you’ve read about the AIDS crisis, it won’t be the last. Here’s some stuff I think you should read or watch. (Links coming soon.)
GENERAL NONFICTION
When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, by Cleve Jones
How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, by David France
And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts. (NB: While that book is beautifully written and incredibly important, it unhelpfully proposed the “Patent Zero” myth, a problematic untruth.)
28: Stories of AIDS in Africa, by Stephanie Nolen
MEMOIR
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, by Paul Monette
Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDS, by Dale Peck
The Sea is Quiet Tonight: A Memoir, by Michael H. Ward
“The Way We Live Now,” by Susan Sontag
Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371, by MK Czerwiec (This is a graphic memoir (meaning comics, not gore), by a woman who served as a charge nurse on the AIDS unit at Illinois Masonic—the same unit I write about in The Great Believers.)
FICTION
The Angel of History, by Rabih Alameddine
Monopolies of Loss, by Adam Mars-Jones
The Gifts of the Body, by Rebecca Brown
The Body and Its Dangers, by Allen Barnett
Push, by Sapphire
The Line of Beauty, by Alan Hollinghurst
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
THEATER
Angels in America, by Tony Kushner
The Normal Heart, by Larry Kramer
Jeffrey, by Paul Rudnick
FILM
An Early Frost (the first movie about AIDS on network TV, from 1985)
Short Fuse (a short documentary film about Danny Sotomayor, a Chicago activist)
Longtime Companion (from 1989)
For further reading, here’s a list from Out magazine of 25 books “illuminating the impact of HIV/AIDS.”
